gnok

It's a time of great change right now and fear is a natural response. The world is going to be a very different place in 4 years time. Try not to let the fear of an unknown future affect your experience in college. College is a great time to learn who you are, to learn what you like and what you dislike, make friends, understand people, pick up new skills and hobbies and drop old ones. I don't know you and where you're headed, but I know you're going to have a great time. Enjoy it and let the future come to you.

For anyone else wondering what OT is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operational_transformation

The gist of it seems to be that its a set of data models that make handling concurrency control and conflict resolution easier in the context of a single blob of data being edited by multiple users simultaneously (similar to Google/Apache Wave)

The COD part is somewhat cultural. Very few people in India will trust a credit card based system that requires you to hand over your credit card number online and accept delivery at some point in the future. Cash usage in general is disproportionately higher than other forms. I think direct payments from bank accounts is next. Cards rank a distant third.

I suspect a lot of us are very uncomfortable with that claim. I think the moonshot and the kernel are both independently amazing feats that don't need to be compared against one another for validation.

I don't know anything about Loom, but perhaps the first step to building a HIPAA compliant image store is to simply build an image store? Perhaps Loom's roadmap or eventual plan is to build an image store for a very specific business purpose? Perhaps its more than just cat pictures?

I don't know either way, but I sure wouldn't assume its designed for the exclusive purpose of "helping hipsters heap hi-res headshots of healthy hobos" (nice alliteration btw).

I don't mean to imply that Yahoo is more successful than Google at acquisitions (We know that isn't the case). I just don't think Google is a good benchmark for acquisitions. I think they as good or as bad as Yahoo.

I think Yahoo's problem with acquisitions has been that they are moderately successful initially and then drift away over time. ViaWeb, GeoCities, Musicmatch Jukebox, Konfabulator, delicious and Ludicorp (of Flickr fame) come to mind. Other than Flickr, none of the others are still around, but they weren't disappointments soon after acquisition either.

I meant the converse, sorry. I was responding to the idea that "a sign of progress" within a year is the same as "making it succeed in the long run".

I disagree. We don't know what Yahoo wants to do with Tumblr. All we have are rumors, a WSJ report and tons of idle speculation. Without knowing what the intended end game is, I don't see how we can call the acquisition a "success" or "failure", much less the CEO's. I also don't agree that "a sign of progress" is "making it succeed in the long run".

Google is no genius with large acquisitions either. Motorola and Blogger come to mind immediately, but there are others too.

I think we can all agree that Yahoo has been mismanaged at least until recently. I just don't think a CEO's performance is a boolean value that depends on an undefined "any sign of failure" on a large acquisition with a 1 year time frame.

I really like Safari's Reader and that feature alone keeps me on Safari. Readability and other similar plugins on Chrome are nice, but I don't find them as well done as Reader.

I beg to differ. For a lot of people, it isn't about the "thinking". Its the reality of their wallets.

A point often neglected in such comparisons (regardless of the actual conclusion), is that paper towels are useful for more than just drying hands. What if I'm at a restaurant and I wish to wipe my trousers because I spilt a sauce on them? Or what if I just walked in from a walk and I want to wash and wipe my face? Or what if I just ate something oily and I wish to wipe that away (oil doesn't evaporate noticeably and will stick around until wiped away).

I don't quite think autotools were invented to replace Makefiles. Autoconf and friends _configure_ the build environment by discovering locations of dependencies, feature sets, available compilers and build tools and other build conditions. This information is then used to generate the appropriate Makefile.

Makefiles solve a different problem; which is of local build dependencies, looking for changes, packaging and suchlike.

CMake, as it happens, was written because Autotools were particularly ineffecient at the configuration problem. Make happens to be very efficient.

Agreed. One of my worst productivity killers at work is the "hey, could you do this little thing? I know it'll only take you two minutes" type of request.

It might only take two minutes to do, but it's also just botched a nice hour long flow with the context switch.

HTML+CSS would provide a fantastic way to view a resume on a web page. However, a resume is more usually forwarded around multiple times via email and then finally printed for a review.

HTML+CSS offers little to no control of how a page would look like once its printed. LaTeX on the other hand, can be optimized with printable fonts, appropriate margins and such like. A PDF with embedded fonts would guarantee that the page would look the same, printed with any computer/OS/printer combination.

What stood out to me immediately, is that 3 of the 4 sets of founders are first generation immigrants.

I found this "little" technique is immensely powerful. I've found that talking to people about everything I'm currently working on (as opposed to what I've completed) deflates my excitement a little bit about what I'm working on. After a few rounds of this, I no longer want to finish what I've started!

Additionally, if I'm able to get that burst of endorphins from people just by telling them what I've started, then I no longer have a strong enough reason to build up a list of things I've finished.

It is, to an extent.

For OS X 10.7.2, you can grab the source at http://opensource.apple.com/source/xnu/xnu-1699.24.8/.

The "README" at http://opensource.apple.com/source/xnu/xnu-1699.24.8/README has instructions on building and installing the kernel. Admittedly, while I have never actually done this, I've seen lots of instructions floating around for doing this "correctly".

Somewhat disappointed after realizing that the videos are all in Flash. So I can't watch this on my iPad. Does anyone know if these exact videos are also available on iTunes U?

Unfortunately, I need access to 4 (or more) devices in each class for testing and buying/selling that many devices becomes a little expensive. Its also a lot more complex than I would like.

Thanks for the link anyhow! I'm pretty sure I'll be able to use them for a different project.

This is interesting. I'll look into this more. Thanks!

Pardon my ignorance but, who or what is AngelList and what can I do with it? Do I need to start with the API

Stories like this are absolutely fascinating. I'm sure there are a ton of lessons to learn from Apple's senior leadership; lessons that would otherwise have been drowned under the attention given to Jobs and his leadership style. You can't have a successful company with one iron-willed leader; you need a team that knows what it's doing.

Link to the real website: http://www.parse.com.

No idea why the appcelerator page is the main story link.

Actually, I'd argue that they're shooting for where the puck will be two years from now (possibly less?). The article doesn't quite mention it, but it sounds like Intel is seriously concerned that future MacBook Airs aren't going to be on Intel processors. If its fair to assume that Air and Air-like notebooks account for the majority of sales in the future, then Intel is staring at a massive drop in sales, two years or so from today.

I'd venture to guess that the $300 million aren't for beating Apple, but for nurturing and mentoring the company that will replace Apple as Intel's primary/flagship notebook processors customer.

Sort of hard to do, if your stock doesn't actually pay any dividend.

Whose twitter username is "Twitter username" in the third choice?

Floored -- A documentary of the floor traders working on Chicago's floors and how the electronic business is changing their lives. http://flooredthemovie.com/community/

Perhaps somewhat off-topic, but your branding seems inconsistent. Do you want to call it "Kickertape.com", "Kickertape." or "Kickertape"?

Please do this the right way. Any issue concerning IP and claims of infringement or violation of rights requires due diligence on both sides. At a very minimum, you should read the transcript of Andrew Tridgell's talk on patent defense at http://news.swpat.org/2010/03/transcript-tridgell-patents.

That your software is open-source is entirely orthogonal to the issue of infringement.

This is a myth. Lightroom and Aperture do not replace Photoshop. They are tools for a different job -- photography workflow management. Photoshop is a significantly different beast and the capital of expertise, tools and extensions gathered over the years makes it pretty hard to replace. I have tried using Pixelmator in lieu of Photoshop, but the lack of support for layers (among many many other features) makes it an unlikely replacement; but I doubt Pixelmator was trying that.